Samsung T379 Gravity TXT Cell Phone (T-Mobile) - Gray/Yellow No Contract

Searching for a non-smart phone, I found this one. I had a Samsung slide phone in the Jurassic (pre-iPhone) era, and I liked it OK. Still, my expectations for this new one were pretty low, due to the cheap price. When I received it, I found it to be a decent phone. It does have some issues though:1. The ringer is not loud enough, no matter which ringtone I select. My old Samsung had a much louder ringer, so it can be done (plus all the smart phones out there have better ringers too, but of course they cost much much more).2. The audio quality is pretty poor, faint and muddy sounding. I have to struggle a bit to hear the person I'm talking with. Usable but could be better. Old phone was better (a pattern is emerging)...3. The slide out keyboard is pretty hard to use. The buttons require a lot of pressure, and they barely stick out - so it's hard to type quickly. They work just OK - it's faster than the phone keypad for texting, but could be a lot better.4. The camera totally sucks. I have never managed to get a sharply focused image. I haven't had any problem taking pictures with other phones, so I'm pretty sure I'm not doing something wrong (though you never know.....). It's so bad that I suspect my unit has a defect, but I'm not going to return the phone for that reason so I'll just live with it (see attached sample). Again, the old Samsung camera worked better, in spite of its low (by today's standards) resolution.5. The touch "joystick" doesn't work very well, it sometimes takes multiple tries to select what you're trying to select (often overshoots or goes off in the wrong direction). It gets better with practice, but it's still not easy. The old phone didn't have this "feature".There are things I do like:1. Small and light, fits in a case on my belt without getting in the way.2. The vibrate function is pretty strong, so even though I can't always hear the ringer I always feel the vibration.3. It's nice to have a slide out keyboard for texting; even if it doesn't work all that great it's a lot better than nothing.4. Battery life is much better than a smartphone. It can probably run a week of normal use on one charge.5. Since it can't actually do much other than be a phone, it saves me a lot of time. No games to play (nothing fun anyway) :-)So it's not an iPhone, but then it only costs 1/20 the price of an iPhone. Given that all I wanted was a cheap dumb phone, this phone satisfies the need pretty well.Update: now that I've been using it for a while, a couple of observations:1. The battery life is not as good as I originally thought. I'm getting 3 days on a charge. Better than a smart phone for sure, but not a week like I originally thought.2. I occasionally miss calls, then find the phone is OFF when I investigate. For some reason it turns itself off occasionally, and not due to a discharged battery. I'll keep watching this, it's a pretty serious issue if true.UPDATEI've had the phone for about 11 months now. Some additional observations:1. Yes it does occasionally power itself off, I have no idea why. I keep it in a belt pouch, and buttons occasionally get pressed. Maybe the power button is getting pressed, but there is a keyboard lock function that's supposed to prevent anything bad from happening due to these spurious button presses. However this brings me to point #2:2. THE WORST FEATURE OF THIS PHONE: the keyboard lock spontaneously unlocks by itself, pretty often, resulting in frequent butt-dialed calls. Drives me NUTS. I don't know how the keyboard unlocks itself - two specific button presses are needed to unlock, maybe it's not hard for this to occur by accident with the phone in its belt pouch. But there's also a major design problem: when I use the phone in a hand-free environment (i.e. a car), any call I place or receive unlocks the keyboard! This is BOGUS. If I happen to use the phone in the car, I have to remember later to re-lock the phone, or the butt dialing starts up again. Maybe this is why the phone powers itself off: first it unlocks itself, then the power button gets pressed in the pouch and off it goes.So, between the missed calls due to random power-offs and the butt dialing due to spontaneous keyboard unlocking, I no longer recommend this phone. I'm hoping it breaks before too long, so I can replace it with something more dependable. It's not worth the spike in my blood pressure.

Good communication with seller. Phone arrived swiftly, looked good and, most importantly, works great. I bought this phone to replace one like it that got wet and stopped working properly. I took my T-MOBILE SIM card from the damaged phone, inserted it into the new one and it works fine.The back of the phone was coated with a finish that scratched off easily. The plastic underneath is smooth with some little scratches. Not too big a deal for me.

Great phones for the kids. I got all 3 of my young teens one of these for Christmas. We have T-Mobile so I thought these would work great. The only complaint I have is that these do NOT come with a sim card. T-mobile sent me free ones but the box said they were included. They are not. Very simple and sturdy phones!

It's a great phone. My only gripe is the touch dot used to navigate menus. Would be better to have regular arrow buttons.

Phone works well, no more updates available for this phone already

I bought a refurbished model. Good price, but the phone shuts off randomly and sometimes it restarts and sometimes it does not. It also drops calls often at times. Probably would have been better to get a brand new one.

Great for teen texting without gigbytes of data usage. Music listening is great too without data overages

CHEAP PHONE FOR A KID WHO CAN'T AFFORD AN I PHONE. DOES THE TRICK..